Kulturgesellschaft

Kulturgesellschaft – November 19, 2024 – 7:00 pm

After watching “Never Look Away” in May, we now continue with the subject of contemporary German art with the Wim Winders’ documentary Anselm.

With English subtitles, again perfect for those members who want to be there but are not yet quite proficient in the German language. So come with friends and family. 

Yes, and of course, the bar will be open and we will serve pastries and coffee. We are looking forward to it! Come and join us on November 19th at 7 pm.

In Anselm, Wim Wenders creates a portrait of Anselm Kiefer, one of the most innovative and important painters and sculptors of our time. Shot in 3D and 6K-resolution, the film presents a cinematic experience of the artist’s work which explores human existence and the cyclical nature of history, inspired by literature, poetry, philosophy, science, mythology, and religion. For over two years, Wenders traced Kiefer’s path from his native Germany to his current home in France, connecting the stages of his life to the essential places of his career that spans more than five decades.

Anselm Kiefer was born on March 8, 1945, in Donaueschingen, Baden-Württembürg, Germany, and raised near the east bank of the Rhine in the region of the Black Forest. Kiefer was named after the nineteenth-century classical painter Anselm Feuerbach and planned from childhood to become an artist. After studies at the university in Freiburg and the academy in Karlsruhe, he studied informally in the early 1970s with the artist Joseph Beuys on occasional visits to Düsseldorf. Before moving to Barjac, in the Languedoc region in the south of France, in 1992, Kiefer made art at home in Hornbach and then in a large converted brick factory in Buchen.

The great majority of Kiefer’s works since his emergence in the late 1960s through the 1990s refer to subjects drawn from Germany and its culture: German history, myth, literature, art history, music, philosophy, topography, architecture, and folk customs, even going so far as to exploit clichés or commonplace icons—for example, Wagner’s operatic Ring cycle, Goethe’s poetry, or the mythical mountain resting place of Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa, ca. 1125–1190). Either directly or by strong implication, many of these references to German culture and history also evoke the uses and misuses to which the visual and verbal propaganda of the Third Reich subjected them. As Kiefer has said in reference to this national legacy of World War II, “[A]fter the ‘misfortune,’ as we all name it so euphemistically now, people thought that in 1945 we were starting all over again. . . . . It’s nonsense. The past was put under taboo, and to dig it up again generates resistance and disgust.”

Kiefer’s interest in exploring the possibility of coming to terms with the Nazi past by transgressing postwar taboos against visual and verbal icons of the Third Reich is replete with irony. In his large-scale paintings or recent sculptures, the weight of history is viscerally palpable. The drawings, on the other hand, can appear delicately lyrical or caricatural. The photographic works in particular suggest to what extent Kiefer’s work is linked to conceptual art of the time and his interest in mockery and humor as tools of expression.

We’ll have 3D viewing glasses, cheap ones, or bring your own.

Source: www.metmuseum.org